Nutrients don’t add up... help

JamieP3enrose

The app is saying I’ve got 151 calories left for the day, but almost 300 calories worth of nutrients. I don’t drink alcohol so no empty calories there and everything I’ve entered adds up correctly. Has anyone else had this problem? My remaining carbs for today alone are 220 calories

janejellyroll

Sounds like you might have chosen some inaccurate database entries.

cwolfman13

JamieP3enrose wrote: »

The app is saying I’ve got 151 calories left for the day, but almost 300 calories worth of nutrients. I don’t drink alcohol so no empty calories there and everything I’ve entered adds up correctly. Has anyone else had this problem? My remaining carbs for today alone are 220 calories

You picked some bad entries from the database

goal06082021

This is a known phenomenon.

If your only goal is weight loss, you can ignore the nutrient info - go by the calories only. For weight loss, all that matters is that calories in is less than calories out. You could survive eating nothing but whole sticks of butter and still lose weight, as long as your calorie intake was less than your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE).

The database is crowdsourced and entries have been contributed by people from around the globe. That means that the numbers are only as good as the people copying them down off the label, and you're subject to variation among different countries' nutritional labeling requirements. A lot of entries are missing micronutrients or even macronutrients (fat/carbs/fiber), some of them have carbs adjusted to reflect net carbs (total carbohydrate minus fiber content - a lot of these are labeled as such, but not all of them), and some of the entries are just plain old and now inaccurate because the manufacturer changed the recipe or serving size or both.

If you, personally, have been advised by your actual doctor (not Dr. Google, or some jagoff in a lab coat on Youtube/daytime TV) to pay attention to nutrient content due to a diagnosed medical condition, then you'll need to do your due diligence and make sure you're choosing or creating database entries with accurate and up-to-date information. If a medical professional hasn't advised you, specifically, that you need to do this, though, you probably don't need to worry about macros.

lemurcat2

OP, you may have added food or changed stuff since you posted, but I see you having 410 cals left for the day and 68 g carbs, 9 g fat, and 36 g protein left. By my calculation, that's 497 cals if calculated by the macros. That's likely a combination of rounding issues and the fact that you seem to be using UK entries for the most part (as well as some questionable ones -- never use "generic"). UK entries don't count fiber in carbs, but some portion of fiber is counted in the cals (US macros will be a bit off for the opposite reason, as we include fiber in carbs but only a portion of fiber in cals).

Yesterday you went 206 cals over and 210 over if I calculate the macro totals, so pretty close.

What are the specific numbers you were looking at when you posted, if you recall, since they don't seem to fit either today or yesterday based on your diary.

Anyway, like others have said, calories are going to be what you need to focus on for weight loss, and are more reliable than the macros. It's easy to get correct macros if you want to count them, but just be aware they generally won't match cals exactly for the reasons I mentioned above.